


Where We're Going, Where We've Been

by Margo_Kim



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Pre-Canon, Secret Relationship, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:41:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through the centuries, Loki and Sif have developed a winter tradition that no one else knows about and no one needs to. There are more ways than just the Bifrost to travel and more places than just Asgard to spend the holiday. And Midgard, for all its faults, can be lovely in the winter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where We're Going, Where We've Been

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bechedor79](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bechedor79/gifts).



> Inspired by [bechedor79's gorgeous Sif/Loki artwork](http://bechedor79.deviantart.com/gallery/?q=loki+sif), specifically [this one](http://bechedor79.deviantart.com/gallery/?q=loki+sif#/d4l0mqs) with some situations and the general mood influenced by [this](http://bechedor79.deviantart.com/gallery/?q=loki+sif#/d40news) and [this](http://bechedor79.deviantart.com/gallery/?q=loki+sif#/d5dd7zg). 
> 
> I hope you enjoy, bechedor! I'm sorry it got so long. It sort of exploded on me.

When Loki left the Yuletide banquet, excusing himself early as he always did, ignoring Thor’s pleading and cajoling to stay as he always did, Sif poured herself another drink and tried not to fidget. Here she’d stay for another hour at least, partially for discretion, partially so Loki could prepare everything, and the wait gnawed on her nerves. She understood the necessity of both, but Sif wasn’t exceedingly patient at the best of times. Being _here_ when she wanted to be _there_ was an exercise in restraint that Sif didn’t appreciate.

At last, at the baying of the great Northern wolves that signaled the midnight hour, Sif judged that she had exercised her restraint enough.

Thor pouted terribly when she begged her leave. “You must stay! This is a night of celebration and abandonment, Lady Sif.”

“And I have celebrated and now I will abandon you,” she said with a grin. It was hard to be grumpy at a banquet when Thor was near. Had she not better places to go, she could happily stay here all night. But she did and so she couldn’t. “Don’t sulk so. It doesn’t suit the heir apparent.”

“Few enjoyable things do,” he said and winked. “Farewell then to the responsible Lady Sif. Enjoy your bed.”

Sif smiled and kissed his cheek. “I intend to.”

The hall of warriors was a long walk from the banquet hall. She ran into no one though. Asgardians knew well enough to stay away from warriors on feast nights when the wine ran thick and lubricated swords as they slid from their sheathes. Just as her dancing shoes were growing intolerable—Sif offered her endless admiration to the All-Mother who glided on her ornamentation seemingly without pain or fatigue—Sif reached her rooms. They were the grandest in all the halls and had always been so since the day Odin bid her stay in his palace as an honored warrior of the realm. The older men grumbled at her finery but they grumbled at her existence so Sif paid them no mind.

As she walked into her rooms now, those fine furnishings seemed, at first glance, unoccupied.  

She stiffened as arms wrapped around her waist, though she knew who they belonged to from first touch. “Every time I come in here,” Loki said, his mouth pressed against her ear, his body pressed against her back, “I’m reminded of how much I hate your interior decorating.”

Sif wrapped her arms over his. “I hate it when you sneak up on me. And you know that my mother designed this room.”

She could feel his smirk against her cheek. “But it’s so fun to remind you that I can. And your mother has terrible taste.”

“And you know that she passed this year.”

“Then she _had_ terrible taste.”

She smacked his hand and reached up to cup his neck. “Come now,” she said as she scraped her nails over his hairline. “Show me what you’ve done. I know how you love showing off how clever you are.”

He kissed the corner of her eye and stepped away. Her back felt no colder without him; Loki was a chilly lover. She turned to face him. What a strange exotic bird he was, she thought often when the light caught him right and turned the familiar planes and angles of his face, the geometry she’d grown up looking at and could still be surprised by, into a map of a place she did not know. “Take this,” he said, pressing a cloth into her hands. Sif smiled down at it. The costumes were her favorite part.

“What is it?” she asked, rubbing the cloth between her fingers.

Loki lit two candles on the table at the end of her bed by pinching the wicks with his fingers. “They call it a cardigan.”

 

Traveling between worlds without a Bifrost was no mean feat, as Loki told her anytime he thought she wasn’t sufficiently impressed. In fact, it was supposed to be impossible. “Does Heimdall know about this?” Sif had asked long, long ago, the first time that Loki had taken her traveling. They had barely been more than kids then, and Sif had been torn between amazement that Loki could do such a thing and bafflement that he’d chose her to share it with. Later, fear would occur to her, but she’d never been able to muster it up. If she felt fear because of Loki, it had nothing to do with his magic.

“Sure,” had been Loki’s answer, which was almost certainly the same as, “I’m not going to tell him if he doesn’t.” Not the most mature position but one Sif followed herself. She couldn’t imagine Heimdall _not_ knowing for one and for another, Loki convinced her that it would only bring up uncomfortable questions about how they knew about it. And secrets were a novelty to Sif. Perhaps not to Loki, who could obfuscate when you asked how he was doing. But Sif lived an open life and knew no other way to live. Loki, and what she did with Loki, was her one secret actively concealed, and she prized it. It sat on her, a weight not dissimilar to the feel of armor or a thick rich dress.

She’d traded both for now, for this red cardigan and plain white cotton white cotton shirt and tight blue jeans. They looked like peasant clothing from Aramis, and the sight of Loki Odinson, prince of Asgard, dressed up similarly in a light yellow shirt with buttons and a green scarf wrapped round his neck, made Sif laugh at the impropriety.

“I am about to transport us two hundred light years across the universe without the assistance of a Bifrost or, I might add, any particular discomfort on your part,” Loki said as he fixed his scarf in the mirror. “You could show a little respect.”

She put her hand on his shoulder, turned him around, and yanked his scarf off. “For the farmboy?” she said innocently.

He scowled at her as she wrapped that scarf properly around his neck. “Don’t do that,” she said, tugging the ends of his scarf straight. “You and your brother, honestly. You throw tantrums at the drop of a hat.” He opened his mouth. She pressed her finger against it. “Shall we go?”

Loki smirked. “One last thing.”

He spelled the blindfold so tightly around her eyes that it seemed part of her skin. It would not come off, not until one of them said the secret word. What the space between worlds looked like, Sif would never know. It drove you mad without magic. That was why you were supposed to stay to the official routes. The splendor of the universe unfiltered wasn’t meant for mortal eyes, and Asgardians were mortal, no matter how they often pretended they weren’t.

“What about you?” Sif had asked the first time he’d blindfolded her. Sif had needed a lot of explanation to go along with that. Their relationship was simpler than.

He’d scoffed. “My magic keeps me safe. You are about as magical as a brick road.”

“Or you’re already insane and the universe can’t do any more damage.”

Loki ignored her. He did that when he thought she was being particularly childish, and he couldn’t figure out a rebuttal. “Be quiet. Take my hand. Be careful.”

 She took his hand. She held tight. And they walked.

This part, Sif knew all too well. Blindly, she ran forward, Loki’s hand her only lifeline as the world burned and froze around her. Her feet touched nothing, but she could still run. There seemed to be no anything in the air, but her lungs filled. When she exhaled, her lips tingled. She’d asked Loki once why that was, and he said that she was exhaling stardust. She was never sure if he was joking. His hand tightened on hers, _are you alright?_ expressed solely through the pressure of his fingers. _I’m fine, I’m fine_ , she squeezed back. And they ran and ran until her feet hit pavement and her lungs burned and the air smelled like metal and meat and smoke and trash and people. She reached out blindly and grabbed Loki’s scarf. Sif pulled him towards her and rested her head on his shoulder while she gasped for air. “I hate that part,” she muttered when she felt she could speak.

Loki rubbed her back. She could feel his sweat through his shirt, the way his chest heaved for breath as well. Sif always appreciated the Bifrost more after going without. He pressed his fingers to her blindfold and whispered a word that had no written equivalent and that no unmagicked tongue could utter. Then he pulled it loose. Sif blinked at the bright, blinding world. A brick wall to her left. A brick wall to her right. A slice of sky in between. Still a little shaky, Sif groped her way towards the light. As she stepped forward, her eyes unclogged and she heard the din. Shouting, honking, crashing, singing, yelling, laughing, screaming, banging, whooshing, still more shouting, all mixed together in a strangely compelling cacophony of sounds. And as her eyes adjusted and she stepped forward, the sun was blotted out by obelisk-like buildings that jutted into the sky, so high that to see the top hurt her neck.

She heard Loki shuffle up behind, his gait awkward. He’d feel the effects of their travel longer than she would. “Welcome to New York City,” he said.

 

Loki had an interesting approach to the past. He was never _bad_ at magic. He was adamant about that. He was better now, of course, but he’d never been bad. “And that time you accidentally turned yourself into a mouse for an afternoon?” Sif would tease.

“What makes you think it was accidental?” he’d reply.

“The fact that you cried in the corner for an hour after you turned back?”

“Transformations are emotional.”

“You’re still scared of cats.”

“Cats are evil.”

Loki would never admit that he’d made mistakes in the past, but he would admit that mistakes were made. The amount of mental gymnastics that must go into that was almost impressive. For example, Loki would never outright _say_ that the first time he tried taking Sif to a specific city of Midgard, he’d miscalculated by about a thousand miles. But he would admit that it had been less than ideal to appear in the middle of Gaigwu tribe meeting in a flash of lightning when they’d been discussing the causes of the recent drought.

That, Loki could agree, had been a mistake. But it had worked out, Loki emphasized every time Sif brought it up. Everything had been quite alright in the end. They’d shot Loki in the shoulder first, but then Sif had explained everything and they’d felt very bad about it afterwards. In many ways, Loki, Sif, and the tribe were very lucky that the journey had so winded the two Asgardians. Had they been more fit, Loki and Sif might have slaughtered the whole tribe in the name of self-defense, an act that would have been wholly unnecessary as the tribe was not so much violent as deeply disappointed.

“So you aren’t spirits?” Chief Gomda said like a child on Yuletide who had just learned that his parents had decided this year to give him the gift of character and nothing else.

Sif smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “We’re just travelers passing through.”

“Argh,” Loki said, because he had an arrow in his shoulder.

“We were trying to summon spirits,” Chief Gomda said.

“Again, we are sorry,” Sif replied.

“Are you sure you’re not spirits?”

“I’m sorry, we’re not.”

“Because you’re the most impressive thing that has appeared at one of these meetings.”

“If you thought we were spirits, then _why did you shoot me_?” Loki said.

Chief Gomda shrugged. “A true spirit would not have been injured. You were much smaller and paler than we expected.”

“I’m taller than all of you!”

Sif kicked Loki as discretely as she could. Judging by the snickering around them, it wasn’t that discrete. The Chief sighed. “You may not be spirits,” he said, “but you are here for a reason. Come. Stay the night. We will tend your wounds and fill your bellies.”

Loki opened his mouth. Sif kicked him again. She wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but she had the feeling that he shouldn’t say it. Loki was still shaky at knowing when not to be an arsehole back then. He wouldn’t master the art of hiding it for another few years. Sif curtsied the way her mother had drilled her. “We thank you for your kind offer.”

Even Loki stopped grumbling once the feast began. (That Sif had yanked out the arrow and rubbed on some healing balm probably helped as well.) They dined on gamey flesh unlike anything they’d had in Asgard. The greenery was just as foreign, not green at all but red and orange and pink. Asgard was a cold land. Its growing seasons were short, its crops were hardy. It had more plenty than variety. Sif was no gourmand, but she got drunk on the new tastes and textures on her tongue and ate until juice dribbled down her chin. She caught Loki staring at her once and swallowed guiltily. “What?” she said, wiping her mouth. “It’s very good. Don’t look at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” he said.

“Yes, you are. Your eyes are very strange right now.”

Loki looked away so that she could not see them. “I’m just glad that you are enjoying yourself.”

Sif chalked the comment up to mockery, which was safer and easier to deal with.

After the feast, there was music and dancing. Loki sat it out. Sif imitated as best she could, and the women laughed at her clumsiness. It was not unkind laughter, and it was rather infectious until what made Sif finally cede the floor to the experts was not her inexperience but because she was laughing too hard to continue. She plopped on the floor next to Loki. “If your father had seen me flailing so, he’d have snapped my sword in half and sent me back to my mother.”

Loki laughed. “And risk your mother inflicting you on the dance halls of Asgard? I think not. Father values his men too much to let you dance with them.” He nudged her shoulder with his and pointed to a man and a woman dancing so close to the fire Sif feared they’d fall in. “They just got married. She’s twenty Midgardian summers old. He’s the same. They were going to wait awhile longer, but this seemed like the most opportune time to do it.”

The couple had eyes for no one else as they danced. “Twenty Midgardian summers,” Sif said. “Can you imagine? What does that make them on Asgard?”

“Less than a year old. Half a year old, I think.”

“They’re babies.”

“In terms of Midgardian lifespans, they’re comparatively as old as us. They do die sooner here.” Loki shrugged and stopped halfway through with a grimace. “They must marry sooner as well.”

Sif watched them laugh and dance, dance and laugh. “I can’t imagine getting married that young.”

“I can’t imagine you getting married.”

Sif looked over at him. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean what I said. I can no more picture you as a bride than I can Thor.” He smiled at her and stopped when he realized she did not share his mirth.

“I did not surrender my sex when I claimed my sword, Loki,” she said, low and measured. “I am a woman as well as a warrior, and I will not shirk the duties and joys of either calling. Do not forget that.”

The firelight made his face unreadable. She feared for a moment that she had angered him, and she hated that she cared if she had.

“No,” he said, his voice almost gentle. “I am not likely to do that.”

They looked away from each other at the same time. They did not know what to do with each other’s faces. Sif watched the dancers swirl in the night, their movements matching the churning of her stomach.

There were things that, perhaps, didn’t need to be mentioned, and that was simply pragmatism. So Sif elbowed Loki out of his revere and changed the subject. “How did you know they got married?” Sif asked.

Loki’s smile was wry. “They asked me to bless their union.”

Sif’s eyebrow shot up. “Really? Why?”

“They said that I am definitely not a spirit, but I am very weird, and the gods of the world act through weird things.”

Sif wondered idly what had been more injured this trip—Loki’s shoulder or Loki’s pride. “You should have done some magic for them. A little illusion and they’ll worship you as a god.”

Loki held out his hand, palm facing down. It shook and did not stop until he curled it into a fist and put it back down. “I may have miscalculated the amount of energy it would take to transport two people.”

“Can we get home?”

He nodded. She doubted he would admit if it was otherwise. No doubt he’d already admitted more than he cared to. “We’ll have to spend the night,” he said. “But I’ll be ready in the morning.”

Then Sif would worry about tomorrow tomorrow. That still left the rest of the night. She rose and held out her hand. Loki looked at it as if it were a foreign object never before seen.  “Take it,” Sif said. Loki did, seemingly because he didn’t know what else to do, and Sif pulled him to his feet.

“I don’t dance,” Loki said. “Not this dance.”

“Neither do I,” Sif said. “But we can try to flail together and see how that goes.”

Loki looked like he was going to say no, but something passed over his face. Perhaps just another trick of the firelight. Whatever happened, Loki surprised her as he wrapped his other arm around her waist. “Lead on,” he said.

They spent the next hour firmly disproving to the tribe that they were any kind of gods or spirits. But when they collapsed that night to sleep—Loki on his borrowed blanket, Sif on hers—Sif couldn’t help but think that this had been far, far better than any of the official Asgardian Yuletide celebrations that she’d ever been dragged to. The old prayer came to her lips. “The Yuletide’s blessing on you in your wanderings,” she whispered to Loki, asleep on the other side of the tent.

“And you in return,” the apparently not quite asleep Loki finished, his voice a low murmur she had never heard from him before, “until the year brings you home again.”

 

New York City was her fifteenth Yuletide with him. First the Great Plains, then Baghdad, Todaiji, Istanbul, Peking. They spent one Yuletide in a frozen tundra they never learned the name of as Loki and Sif met no Midgardians that trip. On Asgard, she would have assumed that war or disease or simply the cold had ravaged the area to leave it so devoid of life, or sentient life as least since the frozen ground was still abundant with the promise of latent nature, waiting for the end of a long winter. On Midgard, Sif had learned to think otherwise. The planet was so _big_ , and one end was so wholly different from the other that they might not have been on the same planet at all. If you had taken her from the waters of the Mediterranean and dropped her on a peak of the Andes, she would have sworn to you that she had left one realm and entered another, one completely unlike the one she’d been in before.

“There are eighteen million people in the city of New York,” Loki read from a book he hadn’t had before as Sif came back with their coffee and her pastry. “That’s about the population of your entire home region.”

Loki had collapsed in the first café that they’d passed, handed her some Midgardian money that she very much doubted had been money before Loki got his hands on it, and told her to get him something boring. Loki hated surprises in his food and drink. Sif ordered him a coffee and requested something sweet and extravagant for herself. The boy behind the counter seemed to know what to give her. When she traveled, she’d picked up Loki’s habit of trying to look as charmingly foreign as you could. People were generally helpful to charmingly foreign people, and those who tried to take advantage of that found themselves outmatched by the trickster god.

Loki frowned at her drink. “What is that?” he asked as he double-checked that his boring coffee was, in fact, boring.

“A pumpkin spice chai latte,” Sif said. She licked a bit of the cream off the top. “It’s a seasonal specialty.”

“Hmmm.” It was a very judgmental sound. She’d never met someone else quite as capable of condemning something’s existence without a single word.

She sipped it pointedly. “Mmm. Delicious. Do you have anything on the agenda?”

Loki tossed the book in his hands onto the table. _Eyewitness Travel Guide: New York_ , she read. Sif wondered where he had gotten it. Probably from some poor tourist they’d passed by who now would have no idea where the best dining and entertainment spots in the city were. “There are over one hundred museums in the city. If we go quickly, we should be able to see them all.”

“That’s the most horrifying sentence I’ve ever heard.”

Loki reached over and broke off a bit of her blueberry muffin. “That was two sentences.” Sif gave him a look. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art seems to be the main one. It’s got a permanent exhibit of works from Ancient Egypt. You love Egypt.”

“Which one is Egypt?”

“Eight years ago. Sandy place. You got in a fight over a woman’s honor that turned out to be someone important’s wife and we spend the weekend dodging the law.”

“Oh right.” Sif smiled. “I do love Egypt.”

Loki rolled his eyes the way that royalty rolled their eyes—he didn’t because it was a plebian thing to do, but you felt the scorn anyway. He reached for her muffin again. Sif tapped her spoon she’d stirred her coffee with on the edge of her mug and smacked the back of his hand with it. “Stop that. If you wanted one, you should have asked for one.”  

Loki was rather like a cat, Sif often thought, and she thought so now as he drew back his hand with affronted dignity. Cats too often did ridiculous things and got away with it by making you feel like you were being the ridiculous one here. “I had no idea my lady was so ungenerous,” he said.

Sif pulled her blueberry muffin closer. There was a direct relationship between the how flowery his language was and how much of an arse he planned on being. “Your lady has been ungenerous the entire time you’ve known her. It’s a bit late to play stupid.” She took a large bit just to spite him.

Loki smirked, or perhaps it was just a smile. It could be hard to tell with a face like his. He had a manner of irony, an accent of sarcasm. Sincerity did not come easily to him. “I never play stupid.”

“You just are then?”

He gave her a look like he wasn’t going to dignify that with a response. Then his face froze. “Oh,” he said, looking over her shoulder.

Sif whirled around. She saw nothing. “What?”

She turned back. Her muffin was gone. Loki was pointedly reading a newspaper. She wasn’t sure where he’d gotten that either. “That wasn’t even a clever trick,” she said.

“And yet you fell for it,” he said without looking up. She hit him with her spoon again.

Sometimes Sif thought about telling Loki that Yuletide was the high point of her year. She thought about it and then promptly rejected it. In fact, it was at the top of the constantly updating list of things she would never tell him. Sif wasn’t ashamed of most of the things on the list, exactly.  _Ashamed_ wasn’t quite the right word. But there were things that Loki needed to know and there were things that he didn’t need to know, and since she was never sure what qualified as the former, she classified most details of her personal life as the latter.

Besides, Loki would be so _smug_ if he knew. He was intolerable when he was smug. He was almost always smug, but normally it just hung around him like a low level of radiation. You’d get cancer from it if you stayed too long, but your hair wouldn’t start falling out in clumps after ten minutes. But give him a genuine reason for pride, and there’d be no talking to him for a year.

“I don’t remember so much neon,” Loki said. Sif snapped back to attention. He was Loki over the top of his paper at a gaggle of nearby girls who made the Bifrost look as sedate as Midgard’s pavements. “Neon,” Loki said again. “Neon.” He always liked the taste of a new word the All-Speak suggested. Six years back when they’d spent Yuletide at a teashop in Shanghai, Sif had spent an hour listening to Loki say “ma” in different tones.

He loved words. If he had not been Odin’s son, he had told her one Yuletide in the quiet hours of the Bombay night, he would have been happy to be a bard and work his way up to being a skald one day. “You would be happy spending your life memorializing Thor’s deeds?” she’d teased.

Loki had been silent for a long time. In the quiet between question and answer, Sif’s mockery drained away, and when he broke the silence, she had listened as seriously as he had spoke. “Perhaps. Why would I resent him his greatness?”

Though the words went unsaid, she heard the full answer in the way he gripped her hand, the way he closed his eyes. _Why would I, if no one expected the same from me, executed in the same manner as him?_

“Neon. Neon. I don’t like it,” Loki said. “Midgard looked much better last year.”

Sif rolled her eyes as she sipped her coffee. “You always say that. Next year, we could pop into a city of gold and rubies and you’d say, ‘I miss the neon. The neon was much better than this.’”

Loki scoffed. “This from the woman who won’t stop comparing every year to Tehran.”

“Because Tehran was lovely. We ought to go back. Stop that,” she said firmly as he gave her a skeptical look. “Do not tell me that you have no interest seeing the same place twice. How long has it been since we visited?”

“For us or them?”

“Both.”

Loki folded the paper and thought. “Four years for us,” he said, “and about one hundred eighty for them.”

“Exactly. It won’t be the same place. I want to see what Tehran has done with electricity.”

Perhaps that was why Asgardians lived so much longer than Midgardians. Their planet made such lazy turns about the sun while Earth frantically zipped and exhausted its passengers by whipping them from one season to the next. Sif had sneezes longer than Midgard’s summers. But you got to see so very much in such a short time. People did speed through civilizations when they only lived at most four years.

Loki stood and tugged the wrinkles out of his shirt. “Shall we?” he said.

Sif drained her coffee. “We shall. Though if you think I’m spending an entire afternoon watching you make fun of Midgardian art, you’ll find yourself sorely mistaken.”

He hooked his arm through hers. “You love it when I mock things.”

Sif neither confirmed nor denied. Both felt like she was admitting too much.

 

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art—or The Met as Midgardians apparently called it, too impatient to even say an honorable place’s proper title—Sif lost Loki fairly quickly. He stumbled across an exhibit on painters of the Italian Renaissance, and he was off. Vocally, Loki was of the general belief that Midgardian art was vastly inferior to the Asgardian variety. Technically, it was true by simple virtue of the fact that Midgardians had so much less time to _practice._ But despite what Loki said, which was usually a bad guide for what he meant, on every trip to Midgard he found a museum. Or art. Or an artist. Or she’d find him studied the architecture with that look in his eye that she never knew how to interpret.

She left him alone at times like that. Art, words, stories, magic—they were his. He made no place for her in them, and she had no desire to make one for herself. Sif wandered on her own. The Met almost overwhelmed her with its nostalgia. It was a monument to all the places of Midgard that she had been. Here was the pottery of Istanbul, though the museum knew it by a different name. The fourth Yuletide trip they’d gone on, Loki had draped them in garments of gold and gemstone and taken them to Byzantium, only to learn that the Byzantium that his tutors had told him of had become Constantinople centuries before and that Constantinople had, in turn, fallen to Turks half a century before. “Which makes you off by two cities,” Sif had pointed out.

Loki had not minded terribly. The idea that a city could change hands, names, customs, laws, and people so quickly fascinated him far more than any of the old tales of Eastern Rome. “Things going wrong are far more interesting than things going right,” he told her as they walked through the city that night, the setting sun dying the golden city red.

“If you’re fond of chaos,” Sif replied.

Loki grinned at her. “Chaos is just another word for change. Your becoming a warrior was chaotic for the court, was it not?”

When the streets held no more pleasures for them, they walked to the sultan’s palace and claimed to be a prince and princess from a distant country travelling to the greatest realms in the world to learn the secret of being a good king. The sultan was so flattered that they’d come to him that he had a feast thrown in their favor with extravagance that made Odin’s feasts look austere. 

“They must love you,” the sultan instructed them while they ate. “They must love you so that they do not know what they will do without you. That is the secret to governance and marriage. They are very similar, no?” he said with a wink. “I joke, but think on it a moment. What keeps a marriage together? We say laws. We say force. We say Allah. All these, yes, they matter. But just as a loveless bed yields a paltry crop so does a loveless state. Your people must do things because they wish to please you, not because they fear what you will do if they are not done. You earn their love, you will hold your nation forever.”

“And what if you do not?” Loki asked. Sif looked at him and he did not look back.

“Then you will be no king,” the sultan said. “Just a man sitting on a throne calling himself great.”

After the feast was over and the celebrations ceased, the sultan had them taken to his finest rooms. “Never let it be said that Istanbul did not accept the hand of friendship when it was offered,” the sultan said before he bid them goodnight. Loki swore that he would tell the imaginary king of his made-up realm, and they retired. There was only one bed, of course. That was how married couples slept. Sif sat on one side and slid the golden bracelets off her wrist. “The people like you,” she said as they clattered to the floor. Loki sat on the other side of the bed and said nothing. They sat with their backs facing each other as the silence rang. “Just because you are not Thor does not mean that you will not be loved,” she said at last.

“I never thought that.”

Even if she hadn’t just heard him lie to the sultan, she would recognize that statement for what it was.

“He’s an old fool,” Loki said. “He has been a king for a fraction of a breath. What does he know of the world? He knows his world. We come from a different one.”

“You think there is no merit to what he says?”

“I think I will marry a woman who will best serve the crown, and love will have nothing to do with that. I think I will rule as best suits the realm, and love will have nothing to do with that either. If I marry. If I rule.”

“The people love your father,” Sif pointed out. She did not know why. She knew it would only agitate him further. But she wanted him to be wrong, and she wanted to press him until he admitted it.

“They love my father because he is great. He is not great because they love him.”

Sif scoffed. “Semantics.”

“I am Loki Silvertongue,” he snapped. “Semantics are what I have.”

She twisted around to face him. He faced forward and would not look back at her. “You are wrong,” she said. “You have much more than that, you fool.” Without his finery, his gold, his cape, he looked so vulnerable. She could see the muscles of his back through the thin fabric of his tunic. She could count the bumps of his spine. He was tight as a fist.

She reached out and touched her fingertips so gently between his shoulder blades that she wondered if he felt it. Then she felt his muscles stiffen under her fingers and knew that he had. But he did not flinch away, and she did not want to either so she pressed more and more until her hand was flat against him. Under her hand, his lungs expanded and contracted as he breathed. She had touched him before, of course. They sparred periodically, she was never shy about hitting him, and Thor had wrapped an arm around both of them and pulled them in for a hug often enough that she knew the Odinsons’ bodies fairly well. But she had never touched Loki just to touch him before, never touched him because she thought it would ease his body’s tension.

She slid her hand up the line of his spine. When her fingers touched the back of his neck, underneath the black hair that he slicked back so fastidiously, he leaned into her touch. There was promise in his movement. It made her fingers curl.

And this was not proper, and this was not right, and this would give him the wrong idea entirely because Sif was a friend, just a friend, just a person travelling with another person, and that was the problem with travel, it made you forget who you were, it made you think that because you were someplace new, you were someone new.

Sif patted his shoulder. “You’ll be alright!” she said cheerily. (In hindsight, Sif wished Loki had been facing her when she did that. She would have liked to see his face.) “Well,” Sif rolled back onto the bed and yawned. “I think it’s time for sleep. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

The look Loki gave her when he turned around was the most baffled face Sif had ever seen him wear. Considering some of the things Thor had done while Loki watched, it was an accomplishment. Despite the luxurious bed, it had been one of the most uncomfortable nights Sif had ever spent. Sif clung to her edge of the bed. Loki stayed to his. They lay perfectly still, once against back to back with the entire span of the bed between them. Sif tried to will her body to sleep. After years of physical training that cracked weaker men, she was experienced in making her body do things that it didn’t want to do. It was no good. She was aware of him now, of the spaces where his body was and wasn’t. It was knowledge you couldn’t unknow, and she resented having learned it. Maybe it was the bias of hindsight speaking, but at that moment, Sif knew something inexorable had started.

In the morning, they’d woken from what sleep they got and never discussed the night before, neither Loki’s fears or Sif’s offered comforts. It was part of the list of things they didn’t say. Sif didn’t practice deception, no. But she knew the value of concealment.

 

Sif left Istanbul and all the cities it had been behind her. She went in search of Loki, intent on dragging him out. Her stomach was rumbling terribly. Someone had eaten her pastry, she thought crossly. Sif tracked Loki down through exhibits where the paintings grew less and less lifelike, until she found him standing in front of a canvas with blobs of paint that formed a human face if you forgot what humans looked like. Loki started when she pressed herself against his back, to Sif’s smug satisfaction. “I could do that,” she said, her chin resting of his shoulder as she eyeballed the mess.

“You could splash paint on a canvas,” Loki said. “It wouldn’t mean anything.”

“Does that?”

“Sadness and anger directed at the self. Warped, delusional self-portrait because the painter can’t see himself honestly. Or this is honest and photorealistic portraits are the ones misrepresenting reality. That life is often messy and ugly, and the best way to capture that is a lot of paint on the canvas. Pick your favorite.”

“I prefer the interpretation where the painter didn’t have a mirror and tried to work from memory,” Sif replied. “While using his bad hand and closing both eyes.”

“Fine art is wasted on you.”

“Mmm, yes,” she said happily. “Let’s indulge in an art form I will appreciate.” Loki raised his eyebrows. Sif smiled. “We passed what I want on our walk here.” She nodded at the painting. “Unless you want more time admiring bad artwork.”

“It’s not bad,” he said as she dragged him away by the hand. “Midgardian, yes. But that does not necessarily make it bad.”

“What does it make it then?”

His hand tightened in hers. “Different,” he said like that meant something more than _not the same._

Loki put his hand over his eyes when they reached their destination like he needed a moment to process the fact that Sif had dragged him away from a collection of Midgard’s greatest art to bring him here.

“Look, Loki. It’s beautiful,” Sif said, more sincerely than perhaps she should have.  

“It’s a dirty looking store selling bits of a rotating log of meat,” Loki said as if that wasn’t, in fact, beautiful. He glanced over at her. She glanced back. “Oh, fine.”

He ordered four servings of it. It came with rice and some greenery that Sif ignored. It seemed a little pointless next to the slivers of meat log (though she’d been hoping for the actual meat log). They ate on a bench in the green center of town, a cultivated bit of forest of the in the center of the metropolis. Near them stood a Midgardian painted silver and posed like a statue. Sif assumed it was some sort of public punishment for theft or a crime. Midgard was a beautiful planet, but you could never go long without remembering that it was still a crude place.

“Still, they do excel at food,” Sif said through a mouthful of gyro.

(“ _Gyro_?” Loki had asked the man selling it.

“ _Yiro_.”

“ _Yiro_?”

“No, _hero_.”

“ _Hero_.”

“ _Gero_.”

“Are you changing the pronunciation every time you say it?”

“Sir, it’s _yeero_.”

The conversation hadn’t so much ended as Sif had pulled Loki away muttering, “Come on, sweetie, lots of sights to see,” much to the relief of the line behind them which was getting more and more vocally impatient.)

“Everything must have some positive quality, no matter how small,” Loki said.

Sif scoffed as she took another bite. “Please.”

“Please, what?”

She sucked a bit of meat juice of her finger and gestured at the world around them. “Don’t pretend that you don’t like this place. The time to deny any affection for it was fifteen Yuletides ago.”

“I’m not pretending to dislike the planet. I don’t have to pretend. I _am_ honest more often than you think, Sif.”

“And yet you come here every year,” she said. “Face it. You like the place.”

He raised his eyebrow and picked at his unpronounceable meat. “It’s loud, polluted, exhaustingly fast-paced. The people are short-live and small-minded. And the entire planet’s too damn hot. I won’t deny Midgard has its rustic charms, but so does a cabin in the woods and I’ll favor the palace over that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Liar.”

“Not on this occasion.”

“Then either you’re a liar,” she snapped, “or you’re a masochist. There are other realms, Loki. We could go there.”

“Other people go there,” he said. “I thought you would appreciate the discretion.”

“Don’t use that tone on me,” Sif said in the same sharp tone. “Do not pretend that _discretion_ is a favor you’re granting me. You’re the one obsessed with secrecy.”

Loki snorted. “One of us has to be. Think about it for a second, Sif. Who would this be worse for if people knew?”

She thought about punching him. She thought very hard about it. Instead, she pressed her curled fist against the wood of the bench and pushed herself up. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. Fine. If the spare prince of Asgard—” Sif regretted the words as soon as she said them. Loki’s face went ice cold. But she was still angry, and she resented him bitterly for always making her care about his feelings when he was done thrashing hers. “If he doesn’t want his lowly consort to be seen with him, then his lowly consort will happily bugger off.”

“Where?” he snapped. “I’m your ride home.”

Sif fished out the charm he’d given her that blurred Heimdall’s sight should he look her way. “I’ll give Heimdall a call. I do much prefer traveling his way.”

Loki narrowed his eyes. “Fine. If that’s what you want, fine. Do it. Have a good Yuletide.”

“Fine. I will.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” She snatched up her two boxes of food. “I’m taking these.” It was a petty gesture, but she was in a petty mood so it felt right.

Loki looked at her like she was an idiot. “Fine. Enjoy your gyro,” he said as she stomped off.  

“It’s pronounced ‘yeero,’” she shouted over her shoulder. Everyone in the area who pretended that they hadn’t been listening before looked over now. The human statue gave her a sympathetic look. “Don’t judge me, criminal,” Sif snarled as she walked past.

 

Once she judged that she’d stormed far enough away and Loki wasn’t following her, Sif found another bench and finished her gyros. She had no intention of calling Heimdall. She wasn’t stupid, no matter what Loki seemed to think of her. The time to tell Heimdall that she and Loki had been sneaking to other realms behind his back had been fifteen Yuletides ago. Her own sense of self-preservation kept her revenge in check. And she had no desire to get Loki into the shit that would be stirred up by this. She wanted to throttle him, sure, but she had her limits.

She couldn’t even say that she was angry at him, as much as she wanted to be. She was just angry. Yuletide was more fun when she was young. Slipping off to a foreign world and pretending to be someone new for a day was more exciting back then. Now it exhausted her, that she and him were something here and nothing there. On Asgard, they weren’t anything to each other—no more than was proper. For the majority of the year, they stayed out of the way until one of them snapped. They fucked in the darkness and parted before morning and said nothing to each other at breakfast. They were each other’s stress release.

And here, once a year, they were—they were tourists to each other. They visited exotic landscapes and took souvenirs to cheer them up when they went back to their normal lives. But they always went back.

They’d been so slow to reach even this. When had been the first time they had talked, truly talked, about the whys of these trips? London, she remembered that. Eight trips ago. Maybe nine. After they’d gone to the Globe.

The player who walked out onto the stage to open the play was a large, fat man and he spoke with a large, fat voice. He rather reminded Sif of Hogun. “Two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we set our scene,” the man boomed, loud enough to be heard even over this crowd, “civil blood makes civil hands unclean, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny.”

“That’s not the line,” Loki said.

Sif elbowed him—discretely. They were, after all, in the nobles’ section. One must behave with dignity. “One line in and you’re already complaining.”

“One line in and they’ve already erred.”

 “You’ve seen it before then?” Sif asked.

Loki pointed to a man playing a soldier standing near the back of the stage. “I’ve spoken to the author. Look how he grits his teeth.”

The narrator bowed and left as six young men came on. “I wasn’t listening. What did he say?” Sif asked.

“Two families that hate each other, their children fall in love and kill themselves, now they are going to tell the story for the next two hours.”

“Oh, is it going to be a sad one?”

“It’s called ‘The Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet.’ I don’t think there will be many laughs.”

Sif smacked his thigh in excitement. “Fantastic,” she said. “The only love stories worth hearing are the sad ones.”

“No happily ever after for you?”

“Where’s the glory in that?” One man on the stage threw a punch at another. “Fake!” Sif shouted at them. “That blow didn’t land.”

The players at the Globe were used to heckling—to the audience, that was the point of going to the Globe—but typically it didn’t come from the nobles’ seats and it certainly didn’t come from aggressive ladies who spent the entirety of the play loudly critiquing their swordplay. “That’s shit, he’ll live,” she shouted down as Mercutio gave his death monologue. “He’s not even bleeding.”

Loki spent the play with a hand over his eyes as he tried to laugh as silently as possible. That was considerate to his fellow theatergoers, Sif thought. Rather pointless in a theater where people passed around a bucket to piss in and periodically tried to climb on stage. But strangely considerate.

“I will kiss thy lips,” Juliet moaned over Romeo’s (unconvincing, in Sif’s opinion) corpse. “Haply some poison yet doth hang on them, to make die with a restorative.”

“Oh, Juliet, don’t.” She turned to Loki. “Is she really going to kill herself? For him?”

“That was what they said at the beginning of the play.”

Sif shook her head through Juliet’s entire death scene. “You tell them,” she muttered as the Prince chastised the parents.

“For never was a story of more woe,” the Prince said with dramatic flourish. “Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

“That claim is doubtful,” Sif said, clapping with everyone else. “But a very good play. It sounds almost Asgardian.”

Loki grinned. “Perhaps he’s a foundling. We should return him home. There’s been a dearth of new poetry worth listening to.”

“Coming back from Midgard with a new necklace is one thing,” Sif said as they rose to leave. “A playwright might be harder to disguise.”

The streets of London were filthy in the way that European cities had tended to be. Before the spread of indoor plumbing, Loki stuck to the cities of Asia for cleanliness alone. “Getting a chamber pot emptied on my head is not my ideal of holiday activity,” he’d told her. Loki must have really wanted to see one of that fellow’s plays to come to London. Every year they’d come to Midgard since then, Loki checked to make sure people were reading his plays. “Midgardians give up on authors so quickly.”

But in 1596, by the Midgardian calendar, she remembered Loki was just pleased to have seen a good play. “Not that I could hear it over you and the rest of the audience,” he said as they strolled down the filthy London streets. “Someday everyone is going to learn the art of sitting silently and all the problems in the nine realms would be instantly solved.”

“I might be able to support that,” Sif said. “Will you be sitting silently as well?”

“Of course not,” he said as he pointed out a pile of horse manure to avoid. “I’m the person that they are all listening to.”

She laughed. “Someday no one is going to pay attention to you and your poor pride will shrivel up and die. That’s always been my theory as to why you bring me. You can’t stand to go more than two days without someone to see you being clever.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Theory implies a mystery that needs to be solved.”

“Yes, the mystery of why you bring me along keeps me up at night.”

 He laughed and then he didn’t. Loki laid his hand against her arm and stopped her in her tracks. “I am genuinely unclear as to whether or not you are joking right now.”

Sif crossed her arms. “It’s not like you to admit ignorance.”

“I’m full of surprises. What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. I have just always wondered why you chose me.” Sif laughed a little. “I understand very well why I go with you, but I am less clear as to why you go with me.”

He looked at her like she had just asked which way was up. “Sif, I bring you because I want you to come. There is no ulterior motive.”

“That’s what you would say if there was an ulterior motive.”

“Or if I had none.”

“Oh. Then that’s settled.” Sif started to walk on, feeling every bit an idiot, when Loki caught her arm again. This time, he kept his hand on her.

“Why?” he asked. “Why do you come?”

He had very long fingers, Sif thought as he curled them around her upper arm. “No reason. Travel. Something new to do over the holidays. I’ve always heard Midgard is nice. Why turn down a free trip? I enjoy meeting new people. One should go abroad when one can.” _Shut up_ , she ordered her mouth.

“Why are you speaking in the formal third person?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I—I don’t—” Loki looked down at his hand on her arm like he had just noticed it was there. “Hmm. This situation demands something that neither of us possess. Though I should point out that boldness has always been more your trait than mine.”

“What are you saying?” Sif asked. She could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

His eye darted down before they met hers again. “I’m suggesting that you kiss me, Lady Sif, if you feel so inclined.”

Sif stood perfectly still. Londoners streamed past them as Loki and Sif stood like statues. _He mocks me_ , she thought. _He saw my weakness and mocks me for it._ “I see,” she said and pulled her arm free. And something behind Loki’s eyes crumbled, and his face was pain itself before he collected himself.

He smirked. “Not even—” he began to lie as though she hadn’t seen, for once, the truth. And the bold Lady Sif grabbed him by the ridiculous Elizabethan ruff and pulled his lips to hers before reason could drown her courage. He grabbed her wrists and kissed her back like he was breathing the air from her lungs. He fit in her hands like the hilt of her sword. _Oh, I could do some damage with you_.

Something jabbed into her ribs. She started and jumped back. “Oi, take that off the street,” a scowling old woman with a walking stick said to them. “We can’t have whores and knaves blocking traffic.” She glared at them again for emphasis and hobbled off. Loki and Sif walked her go. They turned back to each other.

“Er,” Loki said, “should we…talk?” The way he said it, talk sounded like a foreign concept he’d heard about but never actually seen practiced.

“We could,” Sif said. “But I’ve better a few better ideas for what you can do with your mouth.”

And that was the most in-depth discussion they had about their feelings for each other for about fifty years. In retrospect, establishing sex as a valid and preferred alternative to conversations had not been an emotionally healthy decision for the long-term.  Though to be fair, Sif learned that Loki’s words were rarely what you should pay attention to. In the darkness of secret shared nights, when he pressed himself gasping against her naked frame, she knew him best. When they pressed their mouths against each others’ bodies to muffle their sounds, they spoke the truth. That first night in London, after they barely made it inside the room they rented, after he slammed her against the door and hiked up her skirt, after she hooked her leg over his shoulder and bit her knuckles to stay silent, after he held her upright when her legs failed, she looked down at this man she’d known since childhood and realized that she didn’t know him at all. With such honest affection in his eyes, he looked like a stranger.

When she sat, or rather crumpled, on the floor next to him, he leaned over and wiped his mouth clean on her shoulder. “You damn near wrenched my head off towards the end,” he said. “I can see why you have scared all other men off.”

She patted his cheek. She’d never before seen his hair look so disheveled. She liked the way it looked on him. “Mind your tongue,” she purred, “or else I might not return the favor.”

“And that would be the real tragedy of this day if the Lady Sif did not fulfill her duties.” His voice was smooth, his words collected, but he looked at her through lidded eyes and when she reached for him, they fluttered shut. It was a lesson she’d learn again and again through the years: when you were looking for Loki’s truth, ignore everything that came out of his mouth.

And suddenly, back in New York City, back in the Midgardian year 2010, a hotdog was jammed in Sif’s face.

“You hate flowers,” Loki said by way of explanation. “And you love disgusting foods. This seemed more suited to you.”

Sif looked up at him. She tried very hard to keep being angry at him. But he was holding a hotdog out to her like it was a diamond. It wasn’t a very grand gesture; she knew how hard that must be for him. He loathed stooping. He shifted from foot to foot as he stood in judgment in front of her. “Take it or don’t. I can feel the grease.” Sif took it. Loki wiped his hand clean on a napkin and looked everywhere but at her. “You didn’t storm off very far?” She didn’t think he meant it as a question. Sif tossed the empty food tins over her shoulder and jerked her head at the bench next to her. Loki sat.

“I thought you’d take longer to find me. We can normally stretch our fights out for a few days at least.”

“We managed six months two years ago.”

“Please don’t remind me of what you did two years ago.”

“Don’t remind you that I was right?” Loki glanced at her face. “But that was the past,” he added hastily. He rubbed his hands together. Sif stifled the urge to reach over and check his palms for dampness. He wore nervousness so endearingly. “We don’t…we don’t have much time here. I didn’t plan to spend it with you sulking in another part of the city.” He waited for her to answer. She sat back and let him fill the silence. “I didn’t want that.” He sighed.  “I suppose we should apologize.”

Sif held up her hand. “Please. Let’s not. We’re not that kind of people.”

“Oh, thank you,” he said like he’d been pardoned. “We’re not.”

“Thank you for the hotdog.”

“The fact that a noble of the greatest of the Nine Realms would stoop to putting that in her mouth will always baffle me.”

Sif took a large bite. “I like that I know not what animal it came from. It adds an air of excitement to the meal.”

He grimaced down at her soggy, greasy bun. “Please don’t kiss me for the next half an hour.” She elbowed him in the ribs. Loki smiled at her with half his mouth, the other the same straight line of thought. “Does the secrecy vex you so much?”

Sif took another bite so she wouldn’t have to answer. Loki pointedly stayed silent until she swallowed and sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. She gave him a hard look. “The fact that you are ashamed to be seen with me grates.”

He had the same look on his face he’d had in London, a look that said he had just realized how far apart they really were. “I am not ashamed to be seen with you.”

“No, you just think this relationship made public would be bad for your reputation.”

“No,” he said, “it would be bad for _you_. Whenever someone wants to slander your name, they say you slept with royalty to earn your sword. I’ve never been sure how people who have seen you fight believe that rumor. Perhaps they think our sex life is has winners and losers.”

“You are a bad liar, Loki,” she said. “Do not pretend you’re sparing me.”

Loki leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Sif rested her hand on the curve of his back. “I am a prince of Asgard,” he said, looking forward. “I am an heir to the All-Father’s throne. And you are not the kind of woman the court wants as the new All-Mother.”

It hurt to hear. She knew it was true, but it hurt to hear. Sif had never wanted to be a lady of the court, her only weapons her words and her womb. That world frightened her far more than the battlefield; Sif would not survive a day in that lilac-scented bloodbath. But that had been her mother’s world and her mother’s mother’s before that, and Sif did not like failing at things.

“And besides,” Loki said, so quietly that the words did not seem meant for her, “I like having something that’s just…”

“Mine,” Sif said.

“Yes.”

She traced the bumps of his spine from neck to waist. “But you will not be king.” His back stiffened. “No. Listen. Thor’s coronation is next month. He will sit Odin’s throne and rule as his successor.” Loki said nothing. “And you, as brother of the king, can do whatever you please. And it will not matter nearly as much.”

Sif knew not what she was suggesting. She did. She couldn’t say it, but she did. Sif could not be queen, would never be queen, no more than Loki would ever be king. But Sif knew the duties of warriors and women, and both were pleasurable burdens when you loved their aims.

“When Thor is king,” she said, “we may all do as we please.”

“And what pleases the Lady Sif?” he murmured.

“I would like to kiss you in the sunshine before the eyes of all before I ride off to glorious war,” she said.

He looked back at her, a slight smile on his lips. “You’re a woman of simple pleasures,” Loki said. He did not believe her, she realized. That was alright. She had nothing but time and opportunity to convince him, and tormenting Loki to see her side was one of the sweetest pleasures in her life.

He sat back and stretched his arms across the top of the bench. His arm lay touching her back, and Sif noticed it only because her first instinct was not to. On Asgard, such an act would draw gossip from the court for a month. On Midgard, she scooted closer against him. She swallowed and wiped her hands on her jeans. “It’s very sad, really,” she said. Loki made a questioning noise in the back of his throat. “That we’ve been together longer than some Midgardian empires have lasted, and we’re no better at loving each other than when we started.” _Love_ slipped out of her mouth so easily, she did not notice she said it until it hung in the air between them.

The corner of Loki’s mouth quirked up. “To be fair, we are Asgardians. We take longer to do everything.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. “Tell me, did you have anything planned for this day? Or did you think we would just sit on a park bench?”

Loki’s plan was they’d find a hotel. They’d claim a reservation. They’d call each other by fake names as they checked it and they’d pretend to be newlyweds and they’d claim the bridal suite. They’d strip each other of their peasant clothing. They’d lay each other down on the bed. They’d touch with the lights on and the curtains open. They’d studied each other’s bodies in the starlight and the sun, relearning the limbs they’d memorized long ago. They’d order room service when they tired. They’d embarrass whoever was sent to bring their food. They’d watch bad television and talk about bringing talk shows to Asgard. They’d fuck again, slowly and softly as their bodies were overused and oversatiated already, and when they were done, they’d lie in each others’ arms just for the pleasure of holding one another.

But that was later. Right now, they sat on the park bench. They watched the city stream by. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and she rested her hand on his knee. They didn’t speak. That was probably for the best, Sif thought wryly. This seemed like a nice moment. They were never good at sweet moments. They tended to open their mouths and ruin it.

“You smell like grease, you know that, right?” Loki said.

Sif kissed his cheek. “We can’t all maintain ourselves as fastidiously as you do.”

“I don’t know why you say that like it’s a flaw.”

“The fact that you don’t know why is why it has become a flaw.”

 _I love you, you stupid bastard_ , Sif thought fondly. _I look forward to spending the rest of my life convincing you of it._


End file.
